An Academy for Career Allies

“I don’t want to be a professor, but I’ve sunk all this time and effort into the Ph.D. What can I do?” Many faculty mentors feel unprepared to guide graduate students to enter fields unlike their own. They may refer the student to career services and hope for the best. But what happens within the graduate program also shapes students’ beliefs about what is possible —they take cues from advising meetings, offhand comments about the job market and who gets asked to apply for opportunities.

Faculty and staff are well placed to support students’ pathways into meaningful work, complementing the work of career advising professionals. What’s missing is a shared vocabulary, a set of tools and a plan to use the powers people have to act on what they already know.

That’s what we set out to build.

The Career Allies Academy, a program of Ohio State University’s Imagined Futures Initiative, works with faculty and staff to change how graduate programs support students headed toward careers both inside and beyond the professoriate. With support from Ohio State’s Global Arts and Humanities Cross-Disciplinary Research Exchange and Humanities Without Walls and in partnership with career development professionals, Imagined Futures has now convened two yearlong cohorts of Career Allies. The results have convinced us that this kind of ally-building deserves wider attention.

Anyone Can Be a Career Ally

Two convictions underlie the program. The first is that within graduate programs, there are faculty and staff who see the need for change and want to help trainees navigate a changing employment market— they just don’t know what to do, or don’t feel they have permission to do it.

The second conviction is that allies don’t have to become experts on every career path to have supportive conversations with their students or postdocs. They can learn from their alumni, name the transferable skills they are already teaching and talk about “careers” in the plural.

With active partnership from staff members at the College of Arts and Sciences Center for Career and Professional Success, we built a program to support those faculty and staff who want to be Career Allies. We recruited a coalition of the willing—an open call rather than a mandate— with an initial focus on the arts and humanities, where the mismatch between doctoral training and the academic job market is often sharpest. We compensated participants for their time: a course buyout or research funds for faculty, a supplemental stipend for staff. Over eight sessions, with homework between meetings, participants worked toward one concrete, sustainable change they could implement in their own programs.

Mixing faculty and staff turned out to matter as much as the curriculum itself. Our very first meeting became a conversation about power: Staff members were candid about the risk of pushing on these issues without faculty or administrative buy-in, and it remained important to reckon with the different powers available in our different roles. Participants found it a relief to think through these problems outside the “family drama” of their own departments.

Designing Sustainable Change

The Career Allies Academy moved through three phases, each building on the last.

1. Phase one established a shared vocabulary and a sense of possibilities. We introduced participants to ImaginePhD’s framework for skills, interests and values. We borrowed an exercise from career educator Derek Attig that has people sort their priorities using sticky notes—a very effective way of raising questions about how the things people know how to do fit into the life they want. Homework included interviewing alumni from their respective programs and writing up their career stories. This work provided what one participant described as a “radical reorientation”—a mindset shift that helped them see empowering possibilities.

Every meeting throughout the year included participation from career success center staff: They taught participants how to locate alumni, how to talk with students about transferable skills and what support resources exist on campus. Most importantly, Career Allies learned what career success staff do and how we can partner to advance students’ career exploration.

2. Phase two turned participants loose on their own curricula. We adapted Riall W. Nolan and Elizabeth K. Briody’s Career Ready Curriculum tool to audit programs for practical experiences embedded within orientations, leadership, research, teaching and summer jobs. Naming what’s already there gave participants a vocabulary for describing transferable skills and confidence that their programs were already relevant to work in a variety of professions. Then we asked participants to consider how a program could build in more of that experience, weighing the difficulty of a given change against its likely impact.
3. Phase three was about leading change: turning insight into durable action. By design, the Allies’ projects were meant to ensure adoption by incorporating career development content within the existing structures, milestones and cultures of their respective graduate programs. Their projects were designed to be repeatable, to reach most or all students, to cost little, to be shared among units where possible and to make efficient use of career success staff as partners, decreasing the burden on department faculty and staff. As part of the academy, Career Allies rigorously stress-tested their change plans to ensure sustainability.

Allies Are Doing the Work

By the end of the year, our first cohort had generated seven concrete projects, each scaled to fit their own department: alumni outcomes data collection in three units; a new project-based option for the master’s degree in German; a recurring social media series on diverse careers for anthropology students; a career speaker folded into the regular guest lecture series in linguistics; a career-focused alumni event built into new graduate student orientation in English; and a shared, multidepartment event on transferable skills. Another project enlisted graduate students to help build career resources for a departmental website.

All of these projects could be accomplished with reasonable amounts of faculty or staff labor. We asked our participants to stay in touch with department chairs and other stakeholders to build buy-in and ensure that projects developed in ways that they would likely continue in the future.

Participants told us this work mattered to them. More than one participant described walking in to the academy unsure why anyone would pursue a Ph.D. without wanting an academic career and walking out having questioned their own bias. Others said that talking with alumni was inspiring “in just about every way.” The career success center has seen an uptick in requests for coaching and workshops from Career Allies’ departments: Learning to partner pays off.

The impact also extends to students who become part of this work. One graduate student who collaborated with a Career Ally on their project researched new career possibilities in their field, identified concrete steps to pursue them and built a website for sharing those resources. This team project gave the student an opportunity to take on a leadership role among other graduate students. Just as importantly, the student described feeling supported by their staff mentor not only in the project itself, but in their own professional development. After participating in the Allies project, the student felt “more prepared” for a variety of kinds of work—and “more excited about my future career.”

That experience had a ripple effect: The student went on to apply to become a graduate student peer career coach, extending the work of career exploration to other graduate and undergraduate students. The goal of Career Allies is not simply to give students information about careers; it is to create conditions in which students can see possibilities, build the skills and relationships to pursue them, and become agents in helping their peers do the same.

The Value in Replication

We came away from the first year convinced that ally-building works. It took one cohort, eight sessions and a modest budget to turn a group of faculty and staff—some skeptical, all busy—into people who are actively remaking their own programs and who have become activists for the idea that this work belongs to all of us. Seven concrete projects, a shift in how participants talk to their students and a standing network of allies across six departments: It was a strong return on a first attempt. So far, we have engaged participants in 19 departments.

What made the difference for us was treating ally-building as its own kind of program, one with intentionality, tangible work and a deliverable, sustainable project at the end. Departments don’t only need permission from above: They also need the engagement of people with standing, a bit of structure and confidence that the work will actually go somewhere.

Although the transition to employment can be challenging, students and postdocs need not face it alone. So think about who, outside your own office or department, already helps advance your students’ career development. Where are they and what powers do they have? What’s stopping you from working together—and what would it take to find out? Perhaps your allies are closer than you think.